I had scored a half hour with Hector, and once up on his flight deck I didn’t marvel at the view, awesome though it was; I didn’t want to waste time.
I tucked my pad into his tabletop and ran the prospectus for him. Vlade had put me in touch with his old city teammates’ diving co-op, the Bottom Feeders; they were good to go as divers. Vlade’s friend Idelba would serve as dredging subcontractor to them when needed, which, as Hector quickly pointed out, was likely to be often. An underwater drilling firm called Marine Moholes was willing to give us a few days when the bedrock was cleared of its overburden. It was an interesting question as to how many bollards would have to be placed to anchor a floating neighborhood, and how deep in the bedrock they would have to go, and I had gotten an engineering firm to give a preliminary answer: big anchors at the four corners, smaller ones between them: it came to about a dozen per block. How deep would a solid anchor have to go in the island’s schist and gneiss? Depended on how much pull on them there was going to be, also how many bollards you had. The engineers had weighed in, and now Hector and I dickered over that rather daunting depth for a while as if we were engineers. As often happened, I was surprised at how much he knew about the city. I had had to research all this, and here he was quoting depths of true bedrock off the top of his head, block by block.
The attachment cables were easier, as there were now any number of braids and bands made of new materials that were both stretchy and strong. I waxed eloquent on that front. “Hell you could hold the whole island in place with the latest fauxfascia. Its tensile strength was made for space elevators. You could tie the Earth to the moon with it.”
He just laughed. “Tides here max at about fifteen feet between low and high,” he said. “Usually more like ten. That’s what matters.” But that was well within the parameters of the cords I had researched, and he nodded as I pointed that out, and moved on to the platform rafts themselves.
Here again the basic templates were easy. Townships all over the world were floating around using the same tech already. Air pockets, basically; lots of them. Composite rafts, in which the plastics were as strong as steel, the glassy metals utterly saltproof, the diamond sheeting both waterproof and a little flexible. No problem to make a modular neighborhood, each unit the size of one New York city block, thus sticking to the notorious grid pattern already in place. Some of each raft would lie below water, but they were very buoyant, and the buildings on them could stack three or four stories tall before their weight got to be too much. Basements down in the rafts.
All the blocks would then float up and down on the tides and currents together. Underwater framing to keep the canals between them open and navigable, bumpers to keep the outer ones from bumping too hard into stationary neighbors in a storm. Saltproof and rustproof. Photovoltaic paint, farms on the roofs, water capture systems, water tanks on the roofs in the traditional NYC style, lifestraw purification filters, all standard operating procedure everywhere in lower Manhattan. Both water and power would be semiautonomous, maybe even autonomous.
It looked good.
Hector Ramirez thought so too. “You’ll need the city to approve the redevelopment, and reconfirm the old zoning, and maybe get some funding relief. The congressperson for that neighborhood should be on board too. Election this fall, right?”
“I guess so.”
He snorted at my cluelessness. “Talk to all the candidates, or at least the top dozen. It still matters.”
“Even in the wet zone?”
“Sure. It’s a federal issue, the intertidal. You’ll need the Army Corps of Engineers to weigh in. They like to make rulings, play with their toys.”
I suppressed a sigh but he heard it anyway.
“Fucking shut up and deal!” he said. “You get out of trading, you move into the real world, it’s a mess. It doesn’t get easier than trading, it gets harder! Finance is simple in comparison.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know. But you’ll learn. Meanwhile, this is good. It’s so good you’ll take a huge amount of shit for it, and probably someone will steal it from you, do it first and take credit for it. So you’ll have to move fast.”
“I will. And you’ll go in on it?”
“Shit yes. We need this stuff, I know that. Go have some fun with it.”
“Thanks.”
He laughed at my expression. Maybe I was looking daunted. “This is going to eat up your life, youth. It’s going to fuck you over. You should consider quitting WaterPrice so you can afford the time to go fully nuts.”
So I floated back down the Hudson feeling good. Looking for more beavers, dodging ice floes that ranged in size from spilled ice cubes to monstrous icebergs. The tabular bergs, flat on top, served as aircraft carriers for big flocks of Canada geese.
I felt good when I got to Pier 57 and tied off in the marina, and walked up to the big sunset room and saw the gang there, Jojo included. Then I still felt good, but nervous.
Jojo was friendly but not excessively so. Not personal. Eventually she did allow me to talk to her on the side, away from the others, and I told her some of what I had just managed with Hector.
But she frowned. “You know that that’s my idea, don’t you?”
I felt the shock of that statement buckle my knees a little. I had to close my mouth, and as I did I realized my face was numb. “What do you mean?” I said. “I told you about it when I got it started. I’ve been working this up with Hector Ramirez and the people in the Met, Charlotte and Vlade and the others. You weren’t even there!”
“I told you I was doing this,” she said crisply, and turned her back on me and went back to the others. I rejoined them, but there was no way to talk about it there, and she was pleasant to the others, and drinking fast, but cool to me. Would not meet my eye directly.
Fuck! I was thinking as I groveled around trying to nudge her back out to the rail to talk freely again. What the fuck!
But she wouldn’t be nudged. She stuck fast to the end of the bar; I would have had to detach her elbow from it and hip her out the door to get her to move. That was not going to happen. She was tied to the mast. I’d have had to drag her out of there, shout in her face that she had never, never, never spoken of intertidal raft housing stock to me, not ever, and she knew it!
So why had she said it?
Convergent evolution?